NEW OHL OPEN FORUM

The place to discuss general hockey or off-ice OHL issues. Plan your bus trips, ask about the best OHL restaurants, or arena music here. It is also a place for some general hockey chatter outside of the OHL, like the Q, WHL, NHL or the minors.

A quick update, I believe it was the 2006 season that I managed to visit all 20 current OHL arenas at the time. Back then Oshawa, Kingston and the Soo had different homes and the Battalion, IceDogs, and Majors/Steelbacks were all in different locations.

The next target that I set my sightlines on was visiting all of the league's 20 arenas during the post-season. Which I believe I have accomplished (and I'm the only one that matters when it comes to my personal goals). The glaring omission if you can call it that, would be that I've never been to Canadian Tire Centre where the 67's have spent the last two seasons (failing to make the post-season, and while the 67's have had a post-season game there . . . I think) it was not their current home at the time and quite frankly absolutely no one has been to 67's post-season game while that has been there home building.

Thankfully the Rangers have been kind enough to play the two furtherest away teams in the post-season - Soo & Ottawa, so those were taken care of. The troublesome one has been ousting that Kingston arena at any point, it's far away, and let's face it, I"m not missing one of my own team's post-season dates just to go there, and I've only owned a car since 2000 (so back when the Fronts would have been in the second round . . . yeah dates back THAT far). So this season I jumped at the opportunity to see an epic game in Kingston and this evening visited with Karon (Gens Booster Club person extrodinaire) to complete the circuit.

My very first post-season visits to every arena are listed below (most include summaries, other than North Bay as all of their games seemed to have disappeared unfortunately, and the unknown Rangers game pre-dates the online results).

You'll notice that many of these dates coincide with horrible playoff runs or horrible runs for the Rangers, it's not a coincidence, the OHL is a fantastic place in the post-season no matter who you are watching. It also doesn't hurt being somewhat central to Toronto and the remainder of the teams in the league.

Mission Accomplished: All 20 arenas (with a twist)

Now....the next mission would be to see YOUR TEAM in the playoffs in all 20 rinks.

You're well on your way with seeing the Rangers in Ottawa and Soo already.

Meanwhile, I can see Eagle Vision making a petition to adopt the same playoff format that the QMJHL uses (1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15 and so on). That would be the ONLY hope that he could get to see the Rangers play in all 20 rinks in the playoffs.

I have chewed through a tremendous amout of the league in terms of OHL finals visits there's 13 different arenas on the list (12 of which are current) and quite frankly out of the current arenas: Kingston, Soo, Oshawa, Saginaw, Sarnia, all are NOT eligable) leaving behind a very small list.

Surprisingly Barrie is tied for the lead with most different years' visited for the OHL finals 2002, 2010 & 2013. "I don't always visit Barrie in the post-season . . . but when I do it's the league championship . . . . and apparently they lose evey time."